Illustrator CS3 printing issue, status bar slow or frozen

I manage ~20 Mac designers, and we're mixed with Intel and PPC machines. They're all running CS3 now, and we recently updated our printer drivers due to some color issues. Things seemed to be ok, but then two of the users on Intel Macs started reporting that every time they printed from Illustrator CS3, the printer would kick out the actual document fine, but that Illustrator would be stuck with a print status bar on the screen and they would have to force quit. If they waited 15-20 minutes it would go away, but they can't wait that long between printing or using Illustrator. If you're running into the same type of problem, I may have a solution for you. I found it in the Adobe forums, and it is definitely not something I would have though of myself. Enable hiding of the dock. That's it. I did it on the machines that were having problems and they started printing fine without the delay. The users in the forum think that there's a problem with the print status bar that now appears under the Illustrator icon in the dock when you print, and that by hiding the dock it doesn't show that icon, which in turn means it doesn't have to do anything with the icon's print status. I was actually pretty amazed that something so minor could cause such problems, and be fixed with such an seemingly unrelated setting. The users I have are all running OS X 10.4.11, printing to a Xerox DocuColor 240 with a Fiery rip. Printing to other printers caused the same problem though, so it was printer independent.

If you were pulling your hair out trying to find a solution to this problem, hopefully this works for you. If you want to read the original post in the Adobe Forums, you can find it here.